


Of All The Gin Joints

by Project0506



Series: Soft Wars Silly Sides [6]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Crack AU of an AU, Crack Treated Seriously, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-29
Updated: 2020-05-29
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:27:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,682
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24438166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Project0506/pseuds/Project0506
Summary: (Discontinued, left posted for archiving purposes)Jesse's the hard bitten detective with the streets of Coruscant under his boots, and I guess that means Jet is now Jessica Rabbit?  The analogy breaks down quickly.Intrigue!  Betrayals!  Flowery descriptions!  Whiskey!  The Author doesn't even drink whiskey!A Film Noir-style Crack Mystery AU thing(Marked as complete because my enthusiasm fizzled.  This was an experiment that didn't end up working.  Unlikely to be continued further.)
Series: Soft Wars Silly Sides [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1706599
Comments: 16
Kudos: 64





	Of All The Gin Joints

**Author's Note:**

> No clue. Don't ask. Because no clue.
> 
> Changing it to complete because this ended up being more a joke I thought was interesting vice a story I want to tell. Leaving it up because you lovely people commented and I don't want to detract from that! But as I poke at the work I don't think it will move beyond this. With every re-read I dislike the depiction of both Jet and Jesse more, and it's not something an edit can fix. This simply doesn't fit and was forced and I dislike it. This was an experiment and sometimes those just don't work. Sorry to set expectations I couldn't meet :(

It’s an elsewise gray end to an elsewise gray day. Just the latest in a chain of ‘em that reached back just about forever and looked to stretch on just the same. It’s the kind of day that deliberates working it’s way up to a proper storm, enough spitting to make things just that edge of miserable. It’s the kind of day you end with a tolerable cigarillo, a shitty whiskey and long, cool existential crisis chaser. Neat.

It’s a chime and change after closing time when _he_ walks in. Slick-shined boots, legs from here to Naboo. A stormcloud of curls swinging low over an angel’s eyes and a twist of lips that is anything but. He’s a size six trouble in a size five blacks, pretty as a viper and twice as bad for you.

Jesse knows the type. This is Coruscant. You find a gent like that in every third joint for at least the first score of levels low-side, poured over a baby grand, mesmerizing drunks with a throaty ditty or making doe eyes at the pianist. Or vice versa. Or all of the above.

It’s not a problem a man like Jesse’s got to deal with on the regular. He’s not got the pockets for the kind of drinks a gent like that orders, and a gent like that can always tell. Then again, Jesse’s got himself a real proper one all the way back home and it’s been a spell and change since he’s last put hands on him.

A gent like this can always tell _those_ sorts of things too.

It probably’s not coincidence he wandered his way on in just after Jesse’s drawn the blinds down, just before Jesse’s thrown the bolt. He throws the bolt himself behind him, flips off the cheap little orange pink _open_ neon. He strides in his tap-tapping saying trouble just as clear as the neat gray slacks that snug all the way down his long, long legs. There’s a stripe of sunset gold down the outside seams and silhouetting the pockets and zips; tells a man just where he ought to notice.

Yeah, Jesse knows the type.

(It’s a shame about that neon. Bulb always flickers a bit when it comes back on, and Tup’s the only one of em who’s figured out right where to thump it to get it to shape up.)

Jesse hunts himself a bottle and murders himself a drink. The whiskey’s cheaper than a politician’s promising and burns the same as swallowed opinion. Jesse’s got himself the notion that a bit of both might needs doing, coming up here quick.

“Hey there vod, not gonna spare some of that for the company?”

Jesse’d called the voice right. Hell, maybe not even right enough. Won’t do him the disrespect of thinking it a purr. No, this has depth to it, some body. Maybe many bodies, he’d not be surprised. It’s that shaded sort of rumble that you feel like the very ends of fingernails tickling over your scalp and down your spine. It’s an electric burr like a lather brush right to the nerves. It hits you like a tragedy, makes you want to do bad things to see if it’ll keep going.

It’s a cigar smoke voice, but it’s clear him and Jesse don’t buy their smokes in the same sorts of establishments.

Least Jesse could do is offer a drink, in exchange for getting to hear it.

The tumblers might be the nicest thing in this dump, present company excepted. The Captain pretends to taste when he’s got a whim for it, so the glasses and desk chairs are quality even when the asses and liquors are shit. Real glass too, supposedly. Jesse’s not got the beskar ones to drop one to check. They’re _real_ nice tumblers, nice enough that it might have been one of the Captain’s in-laws that got em. Jesse likes his boots on durasteel, can’t quite muster up the enthusiasm for the involuntary flight that might come his way if the Captain decided to take particular umbrage with innocent scientific investigation.

Jesse’s pour is generous. Isn’t his whiskey to be stingy with. If he thinks long enough he’s sure he can come up with a time or two when Dogma’s annoyed him enough to have earned himself the theft. Whatever its sins, the drink’s got itself a good corn color; dances all pretty in the glint of the single desk lamp. Goes with Trouble’s eyes, offsets the three-dot starbright constellation of piercings curving up his left ear.

“Fancy,” he wraps his lips round the word same as he wraps his fingers round the glass: long and possessive.

“You’d know, sir.”

“Hadn’t you heard? Aren’t ranks anymore.”

He doesn’t take a chair. His sort doesn’t, when they want something. Not when they’re all sweet clean lines curving bronzed, not when their dove-gray pressed vest advertises the gilded ratios of shoulders and waist, not with their crisp cream button-down sleeves folded over and over neat and purposeful up to their elbows to hint peekaboo at the dark tail-end of not-button-up-type tats. Not when they knock back cheap liquor in three long pulls that does things the sith’s own temptation to his throat.

“Yeah? Wanna try that lie when you’re not here looking for the Captain?”

Jesse takes his chair. _His_ sort _does_ , when they don’t square with being particularly in the accommodating way. He owns his space, sprawls into it with the kind of blood-deep stubbornness that won’t be budged for anything less than shots fired.

Coruscant doesn’t sleep, it just gets meaner after sundown. The insidious creep of a thousand million headlights, streetlights, houselights walks fingers of bright in slashes through the blinds. The gray of him all but disappears into the stripes of shadows and all but glows in the lights.

“Seems to me if I came looking for a Captain I might have found one.”

Not just a pretty face, this one then. Well-informed and suspiciously so. Well-connected, to have managed to dig up mention of Jesse’s greatest failure.

It doesn’t much keep him up at night, but when he’s up anyway it’ll keep rolling somewhere in his mind, that one last transmission he couldn’t stop. Years of success and it’s that one failure that defines him. Heh. Isn’t that just the way it goes, in a city like Coruscant?

“Seems to me if you came looking for a problem you’ll be finding it faster than you want.”

“I came looking for help.”

He peels himself off the water-stained wallflimsi, slicker than a Nal-Hutta eel. When he shakes out a cigarette his fingers his fingers shake. Confidence. Vulnerability. One of the two of those’s not on the up-and-up, and Jesse’s got himself good instincts for betting.

“Could you spare a light?” he hums and there’s a match glowing in Jesse’s fingers before he’d rightly put his mind to it. Jesse’d almost miss the smile at that, if he weren’t watching. “I have myself a problem,” quavers this harbinger of far too interesting times. He props a shapely hip up on Jesse’s desk and leans his cig on in between Jesse’s hands. “And I’ve heard tell you’re the kind of man who can help me with it.”

“Fraid they led you wrong, sweetheart.” He’s close enough to smell, woodfire and expensive cologne. Knees close enough to bump. “You’re not my type. And you got nothing I want.”

A lie, and they both know it. Jesse’s got himself a good one, all the way back Home, but it’s been been a spell and change since he’s warmed his hands on him. Jesse’s got himself a doctor, all genteel evenness til he gets him loud.

And Jesse’s doctor has a hankerin’ for those buttoned-up types, likes seeing them peeled out of their shell maybe even more than Jesse likes doing the peeling. Never took much convincing, for Jesse to get a holonet display set up in their room.

Trouble here would have had to be exceptionally well connected to know _that_.

But with one neat button undone for a hint of collarbone, he might well be.

“You haven’t heard what I might be offering, or what I want done. Or how grateful I could be, after.” He slinks his way that last half inch, perches his rear right in the middle of scattered holopads and crumpled flimsi and cups of half-working styluses, right where Jesse stares to daydream. He lets smoke wisp like sin from his devil’s bow lips. “A man’s gone missing, and there’s some voices that’ll rumble I did it.” Boot toes tap Jesse’s, and the human mind’s a raw messy thing. “It’s the kind of problem I’d be _real_ eager to get solved.”

He’s a dark-eyed, dark-haired menace come sashaying into Jesse’s joint ahead of the storm, all contradictions starched into nail-neat packaging. It’s not the kind of trouble Jesse wants, not the sort the Captain’ll endorse, strictly speaking. But he’s got the means to make this worth Jesse’s while, so says the platinum spark of timepiece at his wrist and the chain to match the studs tipping down under his shirt. The neon’s finicky and the whole caff stash got contaminated somehow and had to go. Boots could use replacing too, come to mention.

Trouble’s got a holdout in the small of his back and another at his ankle, and the sparkle of his watch isn’t the only metal wrapped round his arm. Jesse thinks Kix would put him on the next shuttle back, if he showed up Home with nothing but a story of a missed opportunity.

He slides himself to setting, full on Jesse’s desk, ankles tucked prim to the side. Jesse crosses a leg at the knee, tips a whiskey salute to the pinup picture he paints. He’s the type of gent that gets what he wants, and they’ve both figured Jesse’s the type that’s weak for that.

“Alright doll.” Jesse fishes himself out a flimsipad from under one corded thigh, steals himself a pen from just beside one shapely hip. “Lie to me.”


End file.
